After Cairo Police Attack, Sudanese Have Little but Rage - New York Times

After Cairo Police Attack, Sudanese Have Little but Rage - New York Times: "CAIRO, Jan. 2 - Hundreds of Sudanese have been released from police detention camps onto the streets of this city with no money, no place to live - and in many cases, no shoes - three days after the riot police attacked a squatter camp set up as a protest to press the United Nations to relocate the migrants to another country.

The walled-in courtyard of Sacred Heart Church here was packed Monday with men and women searching for a blanket, a meal, a place to live, word of a lost relative, anything that might help rebuild a life after the police charged their camp on Friday. The attack officially left 26 dead, including seven small children, and many others injured.

'It is a terrible situation,' said the Rev. Simon Mbuthia, a priest at Sacred Heart, a Roman Catholic church, as he considered the crowd of people looking for help. 'The government here has done nothing.'

Abdul Aziz Muhammad Ahmed, 29, sat shivering on the steps just beneath the metal door leading to Father Mbuthia's offices. 'I'm not sick,' he said through a far-off gaze. 'My daughter, Asma, was killed.' Asma was 9 months old, and her uncle said he dropped her when the police clubbed him.

'I haven't told my wife yet,' Mr. Ahmed said. 'She is already sick.'

The government waited for three months before sending the police out to empty the squatter camp, in one of Cairo's more upscale neighborhoods.

The police yelled at the squatters through bullhorns, ordering them to leave, and shot water cannons into the crowd when they refused. After the Sudanese remained defiant, the police attacked."...

The Sudanese who had lived together, huddled in a small park in the center of a busy city square, said they were fighting for a better life. Their ultimate goal was to go abroad, to be declared refugees and then sent to live in Canada, the United States or Europe.

But many of them said they would have been satisfied if the United Nations had merely paid attention to their needs, their demands and their rights.

All of the migrants had approval to remain in Egypt, at least for a time. In 2004 the United Nations stopped processing their applications for refugee status, which could have given them a chance to be relocated to the West.

The refugee agency, contending that most of the migrants would not qualify because the part of Sudan they left is no longer at war, said that its decision was in the best interests of the Sudanese.

Many of the Sudanese said that life in Egypt was especially difficult for black people because of widespread racism. And the Sudanese saw the refugee agency's action as a closed door, another indignity....

On Monday, many of the men and women hobbled through the church courtyard on feet wrapped in gauze, with arms wrapped in casts and wounds bandaged. They seethed with anger and despair, directed at Egyptians, the refugee agency, and at anyone who was not one of them.

"We will kill you," the crowd began to shout at visitors.

"A lot of people have died," one man shouted. "I will kill you, I will kill you." He waved his hands over his head as others, calmer, restrained him.

The anger and despair were inseparable. Solaiman Youssef, 32, said he had been holding his 3-month-old daughter in his arms when the police clubbed her over the head. She screamed for a while, and then died. His wife is still missing.

"I just wanted to live with dignity; that is all I wanted," he said. "Now I feel angry, sad and I want revenge. I am boiling and I want revenge. I have no hope, no idea what I am going to do next. No money, no clothes, no family."